The Red Sox' Stat Man And The Numbers Game

Bill James Tells 60 Minutes Mets' David Wright Would Be A Top Pick On His Dream Team

(CBS)  This story was first broadcast on March 30, 2008. It was updated on May 10, 2009.

We offer a brief escape from the economic gloom: a different numbers game - the numbers used to conjure up winners - otherwise known as baseball.

It's a pastime that has an almost religious belief in statistics. Find the right permutations and you can be a master of the universe, or at least of the diamond.

Which brings us to Bill James, the wizard hired by the Boston Red Sox six years ago who helped bring a congenital loser two World Series championships after 86 years of drought.

As we reported last spring, James invented something called "Sabermetrics," loosely defined as the analysis of baseball through objective evidence.

Whether it actually works or not is open to debate but baseball, with its unshakeable reliance on superstition, believes the Red Sox have found themselves one extremely lucky charm.

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60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer found Bill James at spring training in Fort Myers, Fla., a shambling giant who strolls unnoticed among the stars and the star-struck fans, about as athletic as a night watchman at a pork and beans factory, which is exactly what he was.

Asked if he tried playing baseball, James admits, "I did play baseball but I have no athletic ability whatsoever."

"What position did you play?" Safer asks.

"I played where anybody else wasn't playing," James says.

He still does. The Red Sox created a new position, Senior Adviser for Baseball Operations. He's an unlikely guru, who for 30 years had been declaring that many of baseball’s hallowed beliefs were "ridiculous hokum."

"I remember by the time I was 14 or 15 I'd begun to realize that a lot of baseball's traditional wisdom didn't actually make sense," James says.

He says he realized that baseball was going to be his life when he "failed at everything else."

Growing up in Mayetta, Kan., rooting for the old Kansas City A's, James, consumed by baseball, couldn't help but adapt college courses to his first love. "I went to a state university in the Midwest and they tried to teach me economics. And I took everything that they tried to teach me and applied it to baseball," he explains.

He tried a variety of jobs, finally ending up as the night watchman at the Stokely Van Camp Pork and Beans plant in Lawrence, Kan. To pass the time while watching the beans simmer, he brought a stack of box scores to work. Thus began the theory of sabermetrics.

"There were certain things that Major League Baseball traditionally believed that I argued were nonsense. One, that you could evaluate a pitcher by his won-loss record. Two, that I -- serious disagreement on what drove an offense," he says.

Like batting averages: the oldest way to measure a hitter, James believed that players who got a lot of walks and wore down pitchers were overlooked. So he embraced a new statistic, "on-base percentage," which has become part of baseball's Bible.

As for pitching, he has said that won-loss records do not tell how good or how bad a pitcher is. "The most accurate thing is to focus on the strikeouts, the walks, the home runs allowed. And to evaluate the pitcher on that level," James explains.

So James stresses another statistic: the strike-out to walk ratio. He says for decades managers used outdated formulas or intuition in making decisions. So night after night, he crunched numbers until he came up with new statistics based on facts that would either support or debunk tradition.

[owlcroft]

"[Bill James's] ideas were finally put into practice in 1997, when Billy Beane of the hapless Oakland A's used sabermetrics to fill his roster with young, underrated, cheaper players. It made the A's competitive."

Speaking as the man who taught Billy Beane what is now called "Moneyball", I am quite disconcerted by this portrayal of James as the inventor of modern baseball analysis (a description I am sure James himself would quickly correct). The earliest serious attempt at analysis was (as so many brilliant things in baseball were) the brainchild of Branch Rickey, and was the cover story of a 1950 "Life" magazine issue. Much deeper and fuller analyses came from the disgracefully under-appreciated Earnshaw Cook, whose remarkable books--"Percentage Baseball" and the later "Percentage Baseball and the Computer"--were my own entry into analysis.

I am also disconcerted by the seemingly obligatory obeisance to the "there are deeper mysteries that analysis cannot reach" baloney [euphemism alert]. Science may not yet know what dark matter and dark energy are, but that does not remove them to the world of the occult; nor, by analogy, are those aspects of baseball not yet fully sounded by analytic methods either removed to the world of crystal-ball gazers or team managers. As more than one person has asked over the years, why does no one ever discuss the wonderful "chemistry" on losing teams? Or, as Leo Durocher famously put it, "All nice guys. They'll finish last." Chemistry is Na+Cl=table salt, not a method to design winning ball clubs.

[JWhittingtonAR]

I have seen this entire news segment before. Since I am 60 years old and retired 5 years ago I am going out on a limb and say it was broadcast in the last 10 years. I have lived in St. Louis, MO; Springfield, MO; Martinsburg,WV; and Fayetteville, AR.
I watched this on 60 minutes and knew from the very beginning that I had seen this report before.

Please let me know when it was originally aired.

thanks

John

[gaddy42]

Great story, Excellent report. Thanks

[joncfrank]

i could not believe that safer did not broach the subject of steroids and how it will or will not affect the evaluation of statistics. i love bill james. used to buy his abstract every year. and nobody would have a more legit reason to comment on the steroid scandal. that is why i watched the program. instead, safer talks about the limitations of stats and the "magic" of baseball. what a load of ***. really, it was one of the most disappointing journalism performances i have ever witnessed. congratulations safer. you can now take your position next to mike wallace as 60 minutes journalists who were backed down by powerful economic interests at the moment of truth.

don''t question how smart he is... did you pioneer a field of statistics? maybe you''d appreciate the knowledge if you didn''t have so much money to throw around.

[hatchersj]

During the 60-Minute segment, the word "sabermetrics" was used, but without an acknowledgement of the organization from which it is derived from: The Society of American Baseball Research(SABR). This organization was founded in 1971 and is made up of researchers just like Bill James, the man who coined the word in honor of SABR.

[bnorton24]

vrquick, if Manny had been claimed, the sox would not have sat on the money. What they replaced him with might have been more productive. Obviously, at the time, no other team thought there was value in that contract either or he would have been claimed.

[vrquick]

How smart would James have been if any team would have claimed Manny on waivers. The Red Sox are Manny and Ortiz performing in the clutch. How''s that for anyaylsis and it took me a few seconds and cost the team nothing